The Lost Art of Just Sitting at a Bar and Talking

I grew up in Hell's Kitchen before it was called Clinton by people who moved here from somewhere else. We had bars on every block. Not cocktail programs. Bars. The kind where the bartender knew your order and your last breakup and still managed to keep their opinions mostly to themselves. You could walk in alone on a Tuesday and leave having settled something. Not solved it. Settled it.

That doesn't really happen anymore.

What We Actually Practiced in Those Places

The lost art of just sitting at a bar and talking was never about the drinking. It was about the specific discipline of being present with no exit strategy. You sat down. You ordered. You had nowhere to be for the next hour except right there. The person next to you might be terrible. They might be exactly what you needed. You found out by talking.

Lou and I had a bar on 9th Avenue we went to for years. Neighborhood place. The stools were uncomfortable on purpose, I think, so nobody got too comfortable staying past their welcome. We talked to a couple next to us one night for three hours. We never saw them again. I still think about something the woman said about her mother. That's how it worked. You got pieces of people's lives and they got pieces of yours and nobody had to follow each other anywhere afterward.

Now everybody's on their phone before they've ordered. I understand it. I do it too, sometimes. But something got traded away in that exchange and I'm not sure we noticed when it happened.

The Tactical Approach to an Evening Out

I'm not sentimental about any of this. I'm practical. I have a medical marijuana card and I use it the way I use everything else, which is strategically. On nights when I want to actually be somewhere instead of half-somewhere, I'll have one of our espresso martinis before we head out. Eight milligrams. Enough to make me actually curious about the world instead of just moving through it.

It's not a shortcut. It's more like a tuning fork. Gets me to the frequency where I'm genuinely interested in what Lou is saying, which, after thirty-two years, is not always guaranteed. He knows this. He appreciates it. Neither of us has said any of this out loud. We don't need to.

The lost art of just sitting at a bar and talking requires you to show up willing to talk. That sounds obvious. It is not obvious. Most people show up defended. Ready to perform the evening rather than have it. I've been that person. I know the difference now.

The Thing About Attention

Hell's Kitchen is different now. The bars are different. Some of them are good in new ways. But the practice, the lost art of just sitting at a bar and talking to a stranger or your husband or the bartender about nothing in particular, that practice has to be chosen. It doesn't just happen because you walked in the door.

You have to decide to put your phone face-down. You have to decide to ask the question instead of Google it. You have to decide that the next hour belongs to wherever you are.

Lou orders his drink. I order mine. Sometimes it's a peach bellini because it's summer and I'm not apologizing for that. We find a couple of stools. We sit down. If you've been doing this long enough with someone, you don't need much to get the evening going. You just need to show up without an agenda and stay long enough to find out what you actually think.

Both of those products are in the fridge right now, if you want to try the experiment yourself. That's the whole pitch. Put your phone down. Pick up your drink. See what comes up.

Thirty-two years. I have heard the Mets bullpen situation explained to me approximately four hundred times. I could give the talk myself. I have my spot on the stool. I have my drink. Lou's voice becomes something warm and familiar and kind of funny.

This was not an accident.